Daytime and nighttime PM
2.5
samples were collected from an urban community in Tianjin. The major chemical components in PM
2.5
, including metal elements, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and ...inorganic water-soluble ions, were monitored. A positive matrix factorization (PMF) model was used to apportion the potential sources of PM
2.5
under different weather conditions. When the Air Quality Index (AQI) was below 200, the concentrations of BaA, BbF, BkF, Na and NO
3
−
during the nighttime were higher than those during the daytime. PMF analysis indicated that secondary aerosols (37.3%), biomass burning (26.7%) and coal combustion (26.0%) were important sources of PM
2.5
in the urban residential community when the AQI was greater than 200. When the AQI was less than 200 in the urban residential community, the main sources of PM
2.5
in the urban residential community were secondary aerosols (50.7%) and fossil fuel combustion (47.2%). The pollution status of PM
2.5
in the residential community of the urban area was serious, and the source apportionments of the PM
2.5
samples in the urban area were different under different weather conditions.
A good heating regulation should be able to maintain relatively stable indoor temperature. Hence, the dynamic control scheme of a heating system should be formulated considering outdoor temperature, ...solar radiation, wind speed and direction, and other meteorological factors, rather than just the outdoor temperature. A dynamic control strategy of a heating system based on an integrated meteorological parameter is proposed, which converts several parameters into one using the equivalent influence method. An analysis of the thermal dynamic characteristics of both the building envelope and the heating system established a complete feedforward control scheme. A residential community in north China was selected to conduct operation data monitoring using the aforementioned model. Results showed that the new control scheme could effectively stabilize indoor temperature. The variance of the indoor temperature was 0.48 using the traditional method, and that of the test object was 0.31 after adopting the proposed model.
Grassland desertification is an important environmental issue that has detrimental impacts on the sustainable development of grasslands and human residential environments. Soil microbial community ...structure might dramatically change during desertification processes because microorganisms are one of the major drivers of ecological processes through their interactions with plants and soil. However, knowledge on the driving factors of microbial diversity changes during the desertification process in alpine grasslands is still lacking. Using a spatial sequence instead of a time successional sequence method, five desertification gradients in alpine steppe were chosen to investigate the changes in soil properties, plants and microbial communities during grassland desertification and to determine the factors that drive microbial community changes. Community coverage, species diversity indices and aboveground biomass gradually decreased from potential to severely heavy desertification gradients (HDs), while species richness and belowground biomass showed unimodal patterns (p < .05). Soil water content and total nitrogen showed gradual decreasing trends, while soil bulk density and gravel content showed opposite trends (p < .05). In addition, both the Shannon diversity index and the Chao1 richness index of soil bacteria increased gradually. The structural equation model showed that of the factors, soil total nitrogen (82.3% of total effect) and soil bulk density (41.4% of total effect) were the most important soil factors affecting soil bacterial diversity. However, community aboveground (43.4% of total effect) and belowground production (13.9% of total effect) were not the primary factors affecting soil microbial diversity. This result suggests that soil microbial diversity during grassland desertification is primarily driven by changes in soil properties, and the effects of vegetation composition and production are relatively small. These findings contribute to the mechanistic understanding of soil microbial diversity by linking changes in soil properties and plant production during desertification processes in alpine ecosystems.
Objective
This study is the first community engagement phase of a project to develop a residential formaldehyde detection system. The objectives were to conduct a feasibility assessment for device ...use, and identify factors associated with concerns about environmental exposure and community interest in this device.
Design and Sample
A cross‐sectional, internet‐based survey employing community‐based participatory research principles was utilized. 147 individuals participated from a focused Waycross, Georgia (58.5%) and broader national sample (41.5%).
Measures
Variables included acceptable cost and number of testing samples, interest in conducting tests, levels of concern over pollutants, health status, housing, and demographics.
Results
The majority of participants desired a system with fewer than 10 samples at ≤$15.00 per sample. Statistically significant higher levels of concern over air quality, formaldehyde exposure, and interest in testing formaldehyde were observed for those with overall worse health status and living in the Waycross, Georgia geographic region. Significant differences in formaldehyde testing interest were observed by health status (OR = 0.31, 95% CI = 0.12–0.81 for home testing) and geographic location (OR = 3.16, 95% CI = 1.22–8.14 for home and OR = 4.06, 95% CI = 1.48–11.12 for ambient testing) in multivariate models.
Conclusions
Geographic location and poorer general health status were associated with concerns over and interest in formaldehyde testing.
The reorganization of residential areas through mass relocation has had 3 impacts on the living environment of the village. Owing to the reduction in the area of the site, the residential space has ...lost the room for inviting non-family members. The number of houses with gardens and fields has also decreased. As the density of housing has increased, more people are concerned about the view from the outside. As a result, many houses close their curtains. The trust among residents is still high today.
Edible food production is a growing area of horticultural interest that can engage multiple generations of rural to urban residents with varying levels of experience. Residential or community garden ...food production can provide many benefits, including the production of healthy produce, establishment of community or social connections, and increased physical activity. Regardless of experience, food gardeners are interested in growing crops and cultivars well-suited to their region and which provide both productivity and crop quality. This means that cultivar selection is a common question for gardeners. However, formal cultivar evaluation is relatively rare in the non-commercial food production sector due to the number of cultivars, the challenges of replicated trial management, and the scarcity of public researchers focused on consumer horticulture. This limits the information available to support new gardeners, which lowers the chances of overall success including high-quality harvests. Such crop and variety selection questions are common for Extension personnel in the United States as well as many others who work with gardeners. Even with this high level of interest, funding for consumer garden trials is limited and the cost of replicated trials across various geographical sites is high. To fill this gap in research and address the need for high-quality data to support education, University of Tennessee Extension and research faculty have developed a citizen science approach called the Home Garden Variety Trial (HGVT) program. The HGVT is a collaborative effort between Extension and research faculty and educators, who select trials, provide seeds, and compile data, and citizen scientists around the state, who conduct the trials using their usual gardening practices in their own home or community gardens. Beginning in 2017, the collaborators have conducted five years of research involving over 450 individual gardeners in more than half of the counties in Tennessee. The HGVT is a novel and effective tool to introduce gardeners to new crops and cultivars while providing previously unavailable data to researchers. Together, researchers and home gardeners collect and compile data that supports residential and community food production success while engaging new and experienced gardeners in participatory science research.
In suburban regions, vacant lots potentially offer significant opportunities for biodiversity conservation. Recently, in Japan, due to an economic recession, some previously developed lands have ...become vacant. Little is known, however, about the legacy of earlier earthmoving, which involves topsoil removal and ground leveling before residential construction, on plant community composition in such vacant lots. To understand (dis)assembly processes in vacant lots, we studied 24 grasslands in a suburban region in Japan: 12 grasslands that had experienced earthmoving and 12 that had not. We surveyed plant community composition and species richness, and clarified compositional turnover (replacement of species) and nestedness (nonrandom species loss) by distance‐based β‐diversities, which were summarized by PCoA analysis. We used piecewise structural equation modeling to examine the effects of soil properties, mowing frequency, past and present habitat connectivities on compositional changes. As a result, past earthmoving, mowing frequency, soil properties, and past habitat connectivity were found to be the drivers of compositional turnover. In particular, we found legacy effects of earthmoving: earthmoving promoted turnover from native grassland species to weeds in arable lands or roadside by altering soil properties. Mowing frequency also promoted the same turnover, implying that extensive rather than intensive mowing can modify the negative legacy effects and maintain grassland species. Decrease in present habitat connectivity marginally enhanced nonrandom loss of native grassland species (nestedness). Present habitat connectivity had a positive effect on species richness, highlighting the important roles of contemporary dispersal. Our study demonstrates that community assembly is a result of multiple processes differing in spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that extensive mowing at local scale, as well as giving a high conservation priority to grasslands with high habitat connectivity at regional scale, is the promising actions to maintain endangered native grassland species in suburban landscapes with negative legacy effects of earthmoving.
Our study investigated the impacts of land‐use changes on grassland plant community in suburban vacant lots. We successfully revealed that multiple factors, including past earthmoving, current mowing, and habitat connectivity, drive multiple compositional shifts (turnover and nestedness) and affect endangered grassland species.
This paper focuses on the optimal scheduling of the charging and discharging strategies of a community energy storage (CES) system, which is shared by the prosumers belonging to a grid-connected ...energy community. The prosumers own renewable energy sources (RESs), while they can buy/sell their energy imbalance directly from/to the power grid. For the sake of increasing the penetration of RESs and reducing the operating cost, prosumers leverage on the shared CES: in particular, each user can only employ a portion of the overall CES charge/discharge profile. Differently from the related literature, where storage devices are individually owned and the battery degradation aspects are typically disregarded, we propose a novel control mechanism based on noncooperative game theory, which allows users to minimize their energy cost as well as concur on the CES resources allocation with minimal-degradation. The effectiveness of the method is validated through numerical experiments on a realistic case study, where a shared CES supplies energy to the local community of residential prosumers. Finally, the comparison with a centralized control approach shows that the proposed framework allows all prosumers to achieve a fair cost-optimal utilization of the shared CES.
Accurate load forecasting is critical for electricity market operations and other real-time decision-making tasks in power systems. This paper considers the short-term load forecasting (STLF) problem ...for residential customers within a community. Existing STLF work mainly focuses on forecasting the aggregated load for either a feeder system or a single customer, but few efforts have been made on forecasting the load at individual appliance level. In this work, we present an STLF algorithm for efficiently predicting the power consumption of individual electrical appliances. The proposed method builds upon a powerful recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture in deep learning, termed as long short-term memory (LSTM). As each appliance has uniquely repetitive consumption patterns, the patterns of prediction error will be tracked such that past prediction errors can be used for improving the final prediction performance. Numerical tests on real-world load datasets demonstrate the improvement of the proposed method over existing LSTM-based method and other benchmark approaches.
Further research is needed on the capability of residential communities to achieve energy self-sufficiency under the constraints of current standards of land use, in particular for the Hot Summer and ...Cold Winter climate zone (HSCW) of China, where the majority of communities are dominated by high floor-area ratios, thus high-rise dwellings, namely less solar potential per unit floor area, while most residents adopt a “part-time, part-space” pattern of intermittent energy use behavior, thus using relatively low energy per unit floor area. This study examines 150 communities in Changsha to identify morphological indicators and develop a prototype model utilizing the Grasshopper platform. Community morphology is simulated and optimized by taking building location, orientation, and number of floors as independent variables and building energy consumption, solar PV generation, and energy self-sufficiency rate as dependent variables. The results reveal that the morphology optimization can achieve a 4.26% decrease in building energy consumption, a 45% increase in PV generation, and a 13.2% enhancement in energy self-sufficiency, with the optimal being 39%. It highlights that energy self-sufficiency cannot be achieved solely through morphology improvements. Moreover, the study underscores the crucial role of community orientation in maximizing energy self-sufficiency, with the south–north orientation identified as the most beneficial. Additionally, a layout characterized by a horizontally closed and staggered pattern and a vertically scattered arrangement emerges as favorable for enhancing energy self-sufficiency. These findings underscore the importance of considering morphological factors, particularly community orientation, in striving towards energy-self-sufficient high-rise residential communities within the HSCW climate zone of China.
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